Where The Newspaper Stands

Civic leaders like to talk about investments, about how the money they spend on public projects is an investment in the community and its future.

In the case of the plan for a new Newport News police headquarters, investment is the right word. Newport News will spend $11 million on a four-story building on Jefferson Avenue just north of Mercury Boulevard. It's making the investment in the right place: a part of town that has been given short shrift as people -- and the money and interest of both the city and private developers -- moved north.

Now the commercial and economic center of the town are anchored around Oyster Point and beyond, and once-thriving areas to the south are getting pretty spotty -- some still well-maintained buildings, too many signs of decay. A case in point is the area where the new police building will go: It was once home to King's Department Store but has declined into The King Flea. Along with all those marginal businesses along this part of Jefferson Avenue, it's hardly the image Newport News wants to present on one of its major corridors.

The plan makes good sense. It brings the police headquarters closer to the northward-bound center of population, while still leaving it close to the southern part of the city, the courts, the jail and city hall. It will mean the police occupy a building actually designed with their needs -- especially their security needs -- in mind. It will mean an end to sharing leased space with other tenants. It will mean suspects and victims don't have to traipse through a public lobby, up public elevators and past offices. It will mean officers don't prepare their vehicles in a public parking lot.

City leaders are sensitive to the need to clean up the midtown area. They have made some commitments and investments -- there's that word again -- in the Jefferson Avenue strip with the eye-pleasing renovation of Crittenden Middle School and the Midtown Community Center. Investors tend to attract other investors. The hope is that a spanking new building will stimulate private businesses to fix up property here, following the lead of Bowditch Ford, which is investing in its dealerships and the Beaconsdale Shopping Center a couple miles north of the police headquarters site. The completion this fall of the east-west expressway will likely be an additional incentive to private investment, and Newport News may add to its investment by moving the Hilton fire station to a spot by the police building. Over on the Warwick Boulevard side of midtown, the city has a plan to spiffy up the Rivermont commercial area.

With limited money and the need to concentrate resources to have any real impact in an area, Newport News faces a challenge in balancing its priorities: continuing to develop the economic and cultural center north of J. Clyde Morris Boulevard, without neglecting older sections of the city.

Jefferson Avenue is one of the main corridors of the city, but once you get south of J. Clyde Morris Boulevard, it doesn't make the best impression on visitors and offers a vista of neglect to those who travel it each day. A good-looking building -- and fewer blighted ones -- will go a long way toward improving the scenery.

Who gets the blame?

As budget crunch hits, watch the finger-pointing

Surely he jests.

"We're not getting the kind of leadership we need," says Del. Morgan Griffith of Salem, the Republican floor leader in the House of Delegates.

Oh?

Morgan also says, "We can take good news, and we can take bad news. But right now the governor has given us no leadership and no news."

Well.

First, let's allow Griffith room enough to do his partisan best. But if he aspires to something more, to actually exert leadership himself, then he ought to rummage through Virginia public choices of the past few years and bear witness to his own participation.

Griffith was holding office, after all, on Nov. 6, 1998, when Republican Gov. Jim Gilmore rejected predictions of shortfalls in the state budget. "Virginia's economy is booming," said Gilmore. "So what's all the gloom and doom talk about Virginia's future?"

Griffith grinned and nodded.

He was a Republican leader, too, when on March 1, 2001, Gilmore declared that the "sky was not falling" and assured Virginia that "it doesn't look like it will end in a place where there are draconian cuts."

Griffith grinned and nodded for that one, too.

Even as recently as this past January, when Gilmore made his last speech before the General Assembly, Griffith was on his feet to applaud the outgoing governor's claims to have left "a conservative, responsible and balanced budget."

Only apparently Griffith doesn't like when the leadership makes things uncomfortable, like when real choices have to be made. You know, when you actually have to match up available public money with existing public commitments.